Book review - Painted pages - Sarah Ahearn Bellemare

Title: Painted pages : fueling creativity with sketchbooks & mixed media
Author: Sarah Ahearn Bellemare
Info: 128 p. - 2011
Finished on: 10 May 2011
Acquired through: amazon.com
Rating: 6-8/10


  
Notes:
What is it with mixed media books these days? It seems a lot of the new ones are absolutely wonderful to look at and a true feast on the eyes, but also they are seriously lacking in content. This book by the very talented Sarah Ahearn Bellemare is no exception. It makes it so hard to rate the book, because I really enjoyed flipping through it and looking at all the wonderful art. In fact I have to admit that is what sold this book to me when I was looking at it at amazon.com. But when a book promises to show me how to work with sketchbooks to generate ideas and creativity I guess I expect more than content that mostly reminds me of a pretty blog.

I'm getting sidetracked here, but actually it kind of strangely reminded me of the Stampington magazine 'Artful Blogging'. I bought one issue of this magazine and all it seems to consist of is pictures from people's blogs and a small description of who they are. No actual inside tips on blogging or the techniques of building an artful blog and working with the available blog hosts out there or even just experiences and pointers on how to develop an audience for your blog (which is what I was expecting). Most featured artist's were just quickly talking about themselves, when they started a blog and how wonderful it all is and all the images come straight from their blogs too (To get sidetracked even a little more, this kind of bugged me, which may seem strange, but why would I pay a lot of money for a magazine that shows me pictures I can see for free online?). What I mean is, Artful Blogging is not about the act of blogging artfully, it's about showcasing people's blogs.

This book is just like that. It's about showcasing Ahearn Bellemare's work and surroundings and in a small way that of some of her friends. It seems the subject (sketchbooks as a fuel for mixed media) is just an excuse to do this and it shows wonderful work indeed and hints to interesting ideas and possibilities, but it does not follow through on them or gets into any detail at all.  Maybe it's the part of me that likes words and writing that just needs more text, more real content. If you're asking for an example of a book that does answer to my impossible standards? How about 'Collage Journeys" by Jane Davies or the art journaling books by L.K. Ludwig or the decorated pages/journal books by Gwen Diehn. They really get down to the nitty gritty of making art or art journals.

Of course it's more than okay to have a book that features the wonderful work of an artist and nothing more, that's actually great and Ahearn Bellemare's work is more than worth such a book, but then don't try to sell it to me as a book that's about the artistic process of using a sketchbook to develop ideas.

All in all I have rated this book twice. I give it 8 out of 10 for the beautiful work in it and if that's what you're going for, then by all means buy it, because it's worth it ten times over and I will be looking it over again and again for this. But I also give it 6 out of 10 for content. I guess it's obvious by now why. ;-)

Some more May drawings

My personal challenge to draw at the beginning of every studio session in May is still going strong. Since I last posted about this little project I have done seven new drawings. From this you can also conclude I was in the studio seven times ;-)

The second week into it I just didn't feel like coloring in my drawings, so I left them as they were. This also made it impossible for me to improve on an image by using gouache. I think sometimes a mediocre drawing can still be made to look good if you color it in a certain way. No escape like that this time!

The first one is a look at my messy desk. I find it difficult to draw a scene with so many things in it and this is by no means a good drawing, but I still kind of like how it reflects my desk of that day.

EDM#9 - Draw your messy desk

 Drawing hands is hard, but it's a good exercise and...your model is always available! ;-)

EDM#10 - Draw your hand

The next one is without a doubt the worst of the lot. This looks nothing like my sunglasses! Who would have thought drawing glasses would be so hard? To make up for the bad drawing I added some details of the glasses on the page to correct myself.

When I drew the next image something started to shift and that kind of surprised me. I no longer had the tendency to want to fill in every line, but started going for simpler lines and just getting the shapes down. This drawing of my hair dryer is not half bad. I have not idea how this shift came about. Maybe that's the thing that comes with practicing more?

EDM#16 - Draw a favorite tool

You may wonder about the assignment and my take on it, but my hair dryer is really one of my favorite tools in the studio. It helps me dry things faster and that is a wonderful thing for impatient little me.

After several black and white drawings it was time for some color again and I decided to try a technique somebody told me about when I attended the sketch crawl in January. He suggested putting areas of color in first to sort of loosely shape the subject you are going to draw and then just draw the correct lines over it. Those lines will come out off kilter, but the effect can be very nice. He was right.

EDM#13 - Draw your phone

My intention for this challenge was to do the EDM challenge that matched the date. So EDM#3 for the third of May and so on. But then impractical assignments started happening like "Draw a musical instrument" (I don't have a musical instrument) or just things I really didn't want to draw. So I decided it's okay to stray a little if the challenge is not to my liking or simply impossible to do.

What I also like now that I'm a little more into it, is trying out different approaches to these drawings. I had done colored in ones, black and white ones, off kilter ones and now I even added a little collage, just for the fun of it. Empty bottles are really hard to draw by the way.

The last one is my favorite so far. I just made a random colored background and then drew the picture over that. My normal pen was too thin and the drawing got 'lost' in all that color, so I went over it with a brush pen and I really like the result.

It's funny, if you do something long enough it sort of grows on you. Last week I still found these assignments to be 'homework', but now that I have started playing a little with techniques and materials it's getting to be quite fun! Who knew? ;-)

I'll keep you posted on the project as it continues. For now I'll just wish all of you a wonderful weekend!

What are you up to wednesday - part 9

After weeks and weeks of tag sheets and border sheets and drawing and coloring things in with gouache, I felt an unstoppable need for mixed media! Who can blame me? Doing the 'same thing' for a long time makes you long for something different and I wanted to get my hands dirty again. Well...mission accomplished! Just look how full and messy my work table is right now!

I put up my very much loved drawing board and started a mixed media piece on acrylic paper. It's pretty much finished. I may add a few details tonight, but it doesn't need much more.  I worked on it for the past couple of nights and I will show it to you up close probably some time next week.  For now I think you can see it's a very colorful piece! ;-)

As for the drawing board, I love using it to tape on paper I am working on or not so big canvasses. It's both practical and impractical. Working on it is practical, because you can put it in the exact right angle to have a good overview of what you're doing. Working around it is impractical, because it's so big it kind of blocks my view of the rest of the table. Still, I keep using it for the practical aspects ;-)

Downstairs at my art journaling table the situation is like this:

The roses journal is finished and my next journal is....my ROD journal! If you don't remember this one, just check out this post I did in january.  I'm still very proud of it.
I had intended to use it as a vessel for the exercises from Liz Lamoreux book 'Inner Excavation', but somehow I just never got to doing that. (So many plans so little time.) So now it will be my next everyday journal. I just started it last saturday, so there's not much to see yet, but here's the spread from this morning and yesterday.

The decorative paper is challenging to write on, because you need something that really stands out on it in order to be able to read it and I like to be able to read my own writing. So this is also a good opportunity to experiment with pens and markers and see how they respond to different papers.

Peeking out behind the card on the left is an illustration by the 'silly' Carla Sonheim. I saw it on her flickr and just fell in love with it. You can see the full illustration here. The image is pasted on a print of a blog post by Ricë Freeman Zachery about creativity and what it is and what it is not. Everybody should read this and can do so over at her blog.

That's it for this wednesday. I hope you're all having a wonderfully creative week!

Second border sheet freebie

It's been a busy couple of days since I posted last wednesday and not much of them was spent on art. But I did manage to finish my second border sheet so at least there's a little freebie for you all to enjoy.

Just click on the picture and you will go to my flickr where you can download the image in different sizes including a 300 dpi original.

This is the last of the series that I made for the handmade book I'm going to do. Again feel free to use these borders in your art or journal. Teri of the blissfully art journaling group I'm a part of suggested making decorative tapes out of these borders and I think that's a very cool idea. You could print them on clear label sheets or sticker paper for instance and just use them to embellish envelopes or packages.


For my book I will be printing them on watercolor paper to make them nice and sturdy and stitch them onto the pages. I will do the same with the labels and tags I made.  I think for now however I want to take a little break from this project and maybe get my acrylics out tonight and do something different.

I'm also planning to do more hand drawn sheets. I have made a whole list of  possible subjects for these and they would keep me busy forever, but it's good to have ideas on the back burner for later. My idea is to do collage sheets that will also be freebies, but I have no idea when I will get around to that, I will keep you posted on this blog though. For now I hope you enjoyed what I made so far. Let me know if you use any of it, 'cause it makes me happy ;-)

What are you up to wednesday - part 8

It's wednesday again! Time goes so fast it feels like I just did this yesterday ;-) Let's see what I'm up to!

First of all a view of my work table. I am working on the second border sheet and started coloring it in. Because I have only colored in a small part of the sheet it has started to warp at the top, but we'll fix that later.

As you can see my childhood toy from my EDM drawing challenges is still sitting there. He's been sitting there since last friday. I just keep forgetting to put him back where he came from. But it looks kinda cosy this way, doesn't it?Maybe I'll just keep him around in the studio.

I am also working on the atlas. All it's pages are gesso'd and now I am adding some color with gouache and watered down acrylics (the watering down is to prevent sticking). Here's the last spread I did so far: 

It's gouache in several colors both painted and splattered on. As you can see the maps underneath make it look really nice. Now that I am doing these backgrounds again I am thinking about maybe doing a tutorial on them. It's really cool the effects you can get when you put watercolor or gouache over gesso. Because the gesso doesn't absorb it so easily you have time to manipulate the paint.

And here is the current state my journaling station. I don't show it that often, but as you can see it has accumulated a lot more art supplies. I am so spoiled!

The Roses Journal is almost full! I think two or three more spreads and it's on to the next one. No idea what kind of journal that will be yet. This photo album has gotten pretty thick though and I really enjoy working in it.

The above spread was done this morning and it's basically writing and a selection of the japanese masking tapes that I received through Etsy yesterday. Ooh, those tapes are so lovely! Now of course I want even more! Will the need for more art supplies ever stop? ;-)